Let’s talk about a critical intersection in the world of security; the combination of physical security and brand reputation. On January 9th 2022, a woman was killed while pumping gas when a 65 year old man backed up his SUV into the gas pump. The pump exploded into flames. The woman who was standing beside it was burned to death. This is a horrific and tragic situation that should never have happened. The gas station should have installed bollards to protect the physical pumps from being hit by a car. There should be a federal law that all gas pumps are required to have bollards protecting them. However, there is no such law and so instead, when loss of life happens from such a preventable incident we are left to ask whether the franchise owner is partially responsible. Many will rightfully criticize the owner and the brand for allowing such…
IT Security
In this this series of articles and videos, I will explore some PHP malware code that has been publicly published. All the samples discussed are derived from a GitHub repository maintained by marcocesarato. The advice from Syspect CyberSecurity Consulting is to always maintain solid web-server security through hardened configuration and monitoring, and vulnerability scanning both internal and external surfaces with a tool such as CISOfy’s Lynis or Greenbone’s GVM. For an example of solid LAMP stack server security you can visit the Syspect’s VPS Deploy WordPress GitHub repository which is a tool for automatically deploying a WordPress website on a hardened Linux VPS Server. If you don’t want to secure your own WordPress installation, you can hire a trained security consultant such as Syspect CyberSecurity Consulting, or you can use another 3rd party managed hosting provider. PHP is a scripting language which means its source code is usually in human…
In October 2021, while writing an article about EDR/XDR solutions, I read an article from The Journal of CyberSecurity and Privacy entitled: “An Empirical Assessment of Endpoint Detection and Response Systems against Advanced Persistent Threats Attack Vectors”. I think now is a good time to revisit that research paper. The study tested state of the art EPP and EDR platforms against simulated APT attacks. They key contribution of this paper is that it reveals what type of TTPs are still able to circumvent top of the line EDR solutions. The products tested in the study are a who’s who of leading endpoint security vendors? Seeing a blog post from Recorded Future discussing the same paper reminded me about it, and wanted to contribute my take on it. The full FINAL paper is available and the published version is available by searching Google for the article title “An Empirical Assessment of…
The Details The Log4J vulnerability in the Java logging package maintained by Apache made headlines late last week. It was disclosed as a Zero Day bug which is easily exploitable, received a CVSS score of 10/10, and includes remote code execution (RCE) on the target host. Associated CVE-2021-44228 is available on the NIST NVD website which provides more information and references including the CISA advisory. The number of Log4J installations has been described as “hundreds of millions” and “countless”. Virtually all Log4J versions (<= 20.14.1 which was released in early March 2021) are vulnerable. The most recent version of Log4J is now version 20.16.0 since subsequent patched updates were released in quick succession on December 6th and December 13th of 2021. If you want to know whether a 3rd party application is vulnerable to re-assess your risk, review the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), if one has been provided, it…
IT Security Best Practices are processes and configurations outlined by industry leading standards organizations such as SANS, NIST, and OWASP amongst others. Some examples of best-practices include: keeping software and systems updated, uninstalling all but required applications and services, segmenting critical network resources, and configuring host and network firewalls to first block all traffic, then allow only required traffic by IP and protocol. But are best practices always feasible for an organization? To some, this may seem like a ridiculous question. Most CISO’s would likely rather consider the question the other way around: “Is not having best practices feasible?”, since their jobs depend on the performance of security controls. So why then did John Mandia of Mandiant Security LLC to respond with “it depends” when responding to that question before a US congressional special hearing in response to the SolarWinds malware [1]? Senator Wyden’s question specifically referenced NIST firewall best…
The Recorded Future web-conference today was a great insight into the deep Cyber-Intelligence technology the company has developed and what it offers organizations. On display were both a definitive set of broad trend data combined with deep and granular information on every aspect of the MITRE ATT&CK framework and beyond. Recorded Future’s LinkedIn profile reports the company as having had Series E funding of $25 million dollars, however Crunchbase reports an even higher total investment of over $50 million dollars. A press report on PRNewswire in October 2021 outlines Recorded Future’s recent investment in CVE intelligence company Cyber Threat Cognitive Intelligence (CTCI) and describes the Intelligence Fund; Recorded Future’s investment platform. For anyone as passionate about Cyber-Security, predictive forecasting, and Intelligence as I am, there is a ton to be excited about with Recorded Future’s platform and capabilities. Here’s what I learned from the conference today. Recorded Future aggregates data…
Linux Dominates Performance-based Computing Market Share Linux may be less susceptible to cyber-attacks because Windows presents such an attactive target by holding the majority of the desktop marketshare. However, Linux servers dominate the global market in some powerful ways. According to industry reports, Linux OSs comprise 100% of all supercomputers, and over 95% of the top 1 million web servers are running Linux. Linux runs on 90% of all cloud infrastructure and dominates the mobile phone market with > 80% of market share. Embedded operating systems, and RTOS for IoT devices? Again, Linux is by far the most popular OS of choice. If you want more interesting facts about Linux’s market presence, you can Read Nick Galov’s revealing 2021 comprehensive summary of Linux market penetration. Knowing how to conduct a Security Audit of a Linux system and services is very important indeed. This most often includes whitelisting required applications and…
What is GVM and OpenVAS? WikiPedia does a really nice introduction to GVM so let jump start our understanding with that: OpenVAS is the scanner component of Greenbone Vulnerability Manager, a software framework of several services and tools offering vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management. All Greenbone Vulnerability Manager products are free software, and most components are licensed under the GNU General Public License. To understand the relationship between OpenVAS and GVM we should refer to the OpenVAS website, which does a good job explaining the relationship between OpenVAS and GVM: In 2019 the branding separation was completed. OpenVAS now represents the actual vulnerability scanner as it did originally and the “S” in “OpenVAS” now stands for “Scanner” rather than “System”. These changes are accompanied by an updated OpenVAS logo. The framework where OpenVAS is embedded is the Greenbone Vulnerability Management (GVM).OpenVAS released with GVM-10 receives numerous performance optimization to address…
Trojan Source: Raw-Bin Hood Pick Pocketing Source Code with Unicode Bidirectional Control Characters
A new type of vulnerability has been disclosed by researchers at Cambridge University in the UK where Unicode Bidirectional Control Characters are used to change the way text appears in the IDE or text editor compared to how the compiler will interpret and compile the source code into an executable. Proof of concept code has been released for virtually every language including C, C#, C++, Go, Java, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Rust, and more. Here is a link to the original paper, a GitHub repository released by the authors that includes proof-of-concept code samples for virtually every popular language and the issued CVEs CVE-2021-42574 and CVE-2021-42694, both having severity score of 9.8 “Critical”. Unicode Bidirectional Control Characters are needed in Unicode because Unicode is meant as a super encoding standard which allows all languages (and even emojis) to be contained in a single encoding standard as opposed to say, ASCII which…
These study notes are provided for students of CompTIA Pentest+ exam. If you notice any problems with the notes, please let me know via email (joseph@ripplesoftware.ca). General Pentesting Engagement Scoping Information Gathering Vulnerability Scanning Exploitation Process Pentest Tools Exploit Specifics Post Exploit Communication Processes
